Slightly omitted from the previous chapter was the reality that this trip to Columbia was not a complete success at all, especially on the wallet. The previous day, I had my tires rotated, and I then celebrated our arrival at the children’s museum by mounting the curb and blowing one of them. At first, I would have said that Columbia’s not a good city to be looking for obscure tires for a weird little Mazda on a Saturday afternoon, but then I got home and looked up my tires and learned that I was lucky to find one at all. Even the big Kaufmann Tires chain has only three in all of Georgia. Anyway, I drove around and around. Businesses started closing and I was hobbling around on the spare doughnut going from store to store looking for something to use. It took two and a half hours to find the tire, then I collected Marie and the baby, and hit the three restaurants that we wanted to see.

Suddenly it struck me that we had quite a drive ahead of us and we were more than an hour behind schedule. I desperately wanted to get to a classic drive-in that’s just on the Carolina side of the state line before the sun went down. I read about Sno-Cap over at Chopped Onion and really wanted to photograph it before nightfall.

I didn’t do this place any kind of justice, but I wanted to share what I could shoot as I lost the light. It’s a beautiful old joint that’s been in business since 1964, and they host classic car shows and motorcycle shows once a month. Inside, it is standard fast food offerings. We didn’t eat – we were fairly satisfied by Columbia and were anticipating a stop in Augusta at a place that turned out to be closed – but we got a root beer float to go and it was pretty good.

You can see all the restaurants that we have visited for our blog on this map, with links back to the original blog posts. It’s terrific for anybody planning a road trip through the southeast!